Murphy’s red past is revealed in BB house

The Scottish secretary’s past was revealed on TV by Tommy Sheridan

AS ONE of Gordon Brown's inner circle he is seen as a champion of New Labour values, who helped rout the party's loony left and became a passionate proponent of free market economics.

However, it has now emerged that Jim Murphy, the Scottish secretary, flirted with the Revolutionary Communist party (RCP) during his student days and regarded members of Labour's hard left Militant Tendency as too soft.

The RCP, an extreme Trotskyist group, defended the Serbs during the Bosnian conflict, despite evidence of widespread ethnic cleansing, demanded the withdrawal of British troops from Northern Ireland and claimed accusations of child abuse were designed to stigmatise working-class men.

According to the party's ideology, the British working class could not be relied upon to mount a revolution because it had become "contaminated" by bourgeois values. Instead, its aim was to form the vanguard of a world revolution.